


all souls sheltered

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: A Happy Middle, Domesticity with Bittersweet Tones, Families of Choice, Fluff, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Not Trespasser Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-31 22:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6489952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If Bull wants to carve dragons on their doors, let him. It may be that Dorian's still entirely, stupidly besotted with this man, who learns apiculture from the ground up and hangs his axe by the door half to lay it down and half to remember its weight—and thus Dorian's judgment is compromised on the point of dragon carvings</i>. </p><p>In which Dorian and Bull fix a house, and Dorian writes his legacy rather without planning to do so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all souls sheltered

**Author's Note:**

> Or, the down-to-earth happy ending fic that no one asked for.
> 
> This basically slides into the [Ash and Salt](http://archiveofourown.org/series/249448) 'verse, but what you need to know is: picture a future in which Dorian never returned to Tevinter for good, and eventually reconciled (to a degree) with his mother.
> 
> Otherwise, it's just ~~melancholy~~ fluff. ♥

It dawns upon Dorian, his forty-second winter upon him, Orlesian soil under his boots and the last repairs of the villa coming along, that the Pavus name will die with him.

The knowledge itself isn't new. One cannot make heirs sprout from the earth in the manner of one's prized cider apples, after all. Maybe it is the sudden shrieking of little voices in the garden when old friends visit. Maybe it is the youthful eyes of his students as they snap to his entry, whether bright or bleary.

Maybe it is that he buried his mother in the autumn. As soon as the earth thaws, he'll plant a rose sapling on the southerly bluff where they scattered her ashes. Dalish didn't really suggest it—that would imply anything beyond a kind of severe civility existed between Dorian's blood family and the greater part of Bull's chosen one—but when she and Skinner last came through, she brought up the elvish custom of memorial trees.

They all do their part in reading between the lines, in this villa in the Arlesans Valley.

*

Dorian certainly never envisioned the rambling mansion as a semi-permanent guesthouse. The heir to the comte who'd owned it was off to Antiva to find her fortune; Dorian took it off her hands knowing that it was both a bargain and something of a disaster in the making.

For the first winter, he and Bull routinely slept in the kitchen, because the entire north facade leaked like it were porous limestone, and the damp winter winds cut straight into the bedroom.

In Cloudreach, after the early planting, they had the north facade dismantled. On her first visit his mother sat with them in the smoke-stained kitchen for breakfast and dinner. Before she left, she'd riddled the rafters with a selection of local flora for healing and seasoning. That is where he sees her most vividly, tiptoeing on a stool to tie a sheaf of maiden's-cradle to dry with a length of linen ribbon.

Soon after she went, the Chargers arrived. The semicircle of their wagons and the sprawl of their tents covered the fallow field below the orchard for two weeks. They, too, trotted up to the villa for meals, only to have Melusine—the cook, one of the few who hadn't balked at a Tevinter offering her employment—banish them onto the terrace to eat.

"Tevinter hospitality, even in Orlais," Krem groused to Dorian, mouth full of the first potatoes from the sunny riverside field, his plate balanced on his knee.

"Oh, it is outrageous," Dorian said, spreading his messy bookkeeping on one of the old stone benches sunk between the terrace columns. "This master of the household only has three walls in his study at present."

"Where's the other one? I should get the big lug to hit me with a shield before we go. There's some trouble being rustled up in Val Chevin. The commander wants eyes on it, and we're close."

"Bull? Out checking the beehives." Dorian paused, glanced up at Krem, and they shared the laugh rippling unvoiced in the air.

How strange and fortunate it is, to still be surprised by the people one knows best.

*

Bull had, of course, never kept a household in his life. Dorian had been schooled to it, bristling through unwanted lessons in accounts and stewardship, because his parents believed that even with servants at hand and foot, he had to grasp the principles himself. A belated blessing, that.

However, Bull could to talk to everyone. He soaked up knowledge like the earth after a drought, and while Dorian struggled to shed his steep Tevinter accent—once a mark of prickly resistance—Bull endeared himself to the locals and set to seeking their advice on matters of stonemasonry and field rotation so quickly that on anyone else, it'd have shamed Dorian.

Instead, foremost was—is—warm pride like a lump in his throat. The things they could build together. The things that they _would_. That they still are.

Summer came, and autumn, and winter again. Vivienne wrote from Val Royeaux to invite Dorian over in cordial, irrefutable tones, and he went, leaving Bull to manage the swirling chaos of the reconstruction.

"Her Imperial Majesty has given me permission," she told him after a magnificent supper, "to open an academy at the White Spire."

Dorian sat up straight through the mellow stupor of food and wine. The White Spire, the most hallowed of the old Circles. He'd heard tell of both the sprawling libraries and the equally labyrinthine dungeons beneath. It was where the phylacteries, the deepest and most insidious leashes on the southern mages, had once been kept.

"Presumably you mean to also fill the cells with rubble?"

"First of all." Her slanted eyebrow berated him for even asking, much as she knew he had to. "However, it's very well for the Divine to liberate the mages, but you must be aware of the incidents arising all over. Gifted children have hardly stopped being born."

"But—here you have facilities. You have the greatest trove of surviving resources south of the Imperium. You have the old summoning circles, the laboratories. Everything they'd need to learn."

Could one build success and security upon the bones of such grief?

"Indeed," she said, and he breathed in. "What I lack are people to teach them."

It took him, perhaps, an embarrassingly long moment to understand that she was serious.

*

Four years down the road, he has regretted a few aspects. The long weeks away from Bull; seeing his mother less often, even towards the end. The hideous winter roads whose dirt and damp gnaw on his joints like they never used to; certain troubles that can't be avoided when practices and routines, curriculae and materials are in constant stir. The curse of a young endeavour based on rules no one's tried out before.

The Orlesian enchanters mutter louder when he passes them in the halls. Someone ransacks his office and leaves his lesson plans scattered and trampled, as if furious to find nothing condemning. Working all night, Dorian copies everything over onto pristine sheets, and tries not to think of what they sought. Blood rituals? Controversial suggestions of Andraste as a mage? Whatever proof that the _Tevinter_ was not fit to be part of this bold new venture.

He makes no complaint to the rector. He simply sees to it that when she next drops by during a warding lesson, his six students each conjure barriers that'd withstand a punch from a golem.

"Her face was a sight to behold," Dorian tells Bull later, when they've taken the reunion sex to the dense Antivan carpet and the floor cushions by the fire. So were _their_ faces: six triumphant, sweating faces, from Aidan's creeping grin to Nevenna's blush, visible even against the deep copper of her skin. 

"You work hard and you know your shit. Who'd have thought?" Bull's spine creaks as he stretches, mellow with the aftermath. Dorian is tempted to lean in and forget the topic, to bury himself in Bull for another hour or three. Too few opportunities lately.

"I didn't quite think," he admits. "I... had a point to prove. I'm not like you, _amatus_. I can't simply walk in there and make them adore me."

He lets Bull laugh, because it's a loving sound, born from long years together, and twined into it is the knowledge of how rare such words are from Dorian. "No. You took six kids who had to leave their families because there's something inside them that lit the world on fire not ten years ago, and then you worked with them 'til they turned that into a victory."

All of them are old enough to remember the war. The Breach, the breaking of the Circles.

"I did do that." Dorian drops his head back against Bull's shoulder. The cushions shift, his hip landing on the floor. The council of enchanters appointed him to spell defence due to his first-hand experience: he's only a specialist because lives used to depend on his glyphs and barriers holding. "I... May I tell you something?"

Bull's fingers knead a prompting circle through his hair.

"I think of my father sometimes. The day I made enchanter. In the stands, bursting with pride, forgetting not to smile. And I wonder if this is what he felt like."

He can't even ask his mother now. She might've told him, in these baffling, later years, when he came around to the cautious pleasure of making a friend of one's parent.

"Sweetheart," Bull says, chiding and comforting. "Am I gonna tell you again?"

Pain and disappointment may not scour away the love. It is ever a barbed thing in the pit of his stomach: he had a father who wanted the best for him but never stopped to count the cost. Never stopped to ask him.

"Did you ever wish for—" Dorian goes to change the topic, then bites the tip of his tongue.

Bull waits before testing the silence. "For things to be different?"

Dorian curls into him. That isn't what he meant to append to his question, but he lets Bull speak on.

"I guess the sticking point is, where would I start? Seheron? Walking out of Fisher's Bleeders? Listening to Krem run his know-it-all mouth about the Inquisition?"

Dorian takes Bull's slack hand, bringing it up to kiss his palm. Beneath the sweat and sex, his skin smells of grass and leather, beeswax and spring soil.

"I know why you'd do that," Bull says. "Think about every turn you didn't take. Not sure that I can."

"In this—out of many things—you might be wiser than me."

Grumbling, Bull tugs Dorian up into a kiss, and for a while he forgets his unasked question.

*

It lurks around the sleepless hems of the planting season, which, beyond the not infrequent joys of having Bull back, is the reason for Dorian's return. The academy settles its semesters around the annums and the agricultural year; Dorian exchanges classes and debates for house accounts and Wintersend preparations.

The year turns. He plants the rose, a hardy Vol Dorma strain that bursts into three dozen thumb-sized blossoms come All Souls' Day. For a few days, half the estate smells like his mother's garden in Qarinus. With a bit in his throat Dorian opens the windows and lets the wind drift into his study every morning.

Now that the villa itself stands, Bull begins to measure and sketch the old railings and shutters, the handles and windowsills. Dorian leans over his shoulder and traces the charcoal drawings with careful fingers. Dorian's inheritance may have paid for the house, but at some point it's become Bull's labour of love. There is the banister of the main stairs, its sweep wrapped with vines of angular flowers; here the terrace door, flanked by elongated, rearing dragons.

"They're beautiful," he says. "They'll ruin any chance we might have of selling this place, but..."

"Are we looking to move, _kadan_?" The epithet may have a pinprick point, familiarly as it rolls from Bull's tongue. "I didn't think getting rid of the house would be why you'd fight me for the decor."

"I like the decor." Dorian blows charcoal dust from his fingertips. "No, no, I do. You tolerate my nostalgia for sitting on the floor, in any case."

If Bull wants to carve dragons on their doors, let him. It may be that Dorian's still entirely, stupidly besotted with this man, who learns apiculture from the ground up and hangs his axe by the door half to lay it down and half to remember its weight—and thus Dorian's judgment is compromised on the point of dragon carvings.

"We're not going anywhere, either," he says. "Not for a long time." Not, if Dorian has any say in it, while they both live. And in this summer of peace, why would he think of death? The fields glow with wheat and the orchard with apple blossom, and soon he needs to be back in Val Royeaux and his teaching.

*

The Academy—it wears the capital letter in a wobbling way, like a hat forever slipping over its eyes—houses its students but empties outside semesters. A few overly dutiful but necessary days early, Dorian is surprised, then, to find his brightest pupil already in the library.

She's trying, not very successfully, not to sob into a hand-scribed copy of _The Principles of Summoning_.

In spurts and starts, over an awkwardly presented mug of tea, he comes to understand that there was a summer plague near Ghislain. The hamlet where Nevenna's father was the smith, her mother a candlemaker, was burned to its foundations to contain the epidemic. They'd been reluctant to send her away, but she'd begged, fearful of her dreams, tantalised by the mirage of Val Royeaux and the promise of learning the likes of which no one in her village could reach.

Dorian pats her shoulder and tells her he'll speak to the rector, if she needs time away from lessons.

"No!" She balks at once, horrified at her slip. "I—I'm sorry, I meant no harm, I just—" She touches the closed tome. Its leather cover dents slightly under her pressing fingers. "I have to study. It's all that makes sense. Please."

So he gives this dreamy, needle-sharp girl the only help he can: he keeps teaching her. He knows what it is to depend on work to keep oneself sane. She comes to lessons with bruised eyes and chewed nails and never misses a one. Her warding glyphs coalesce into picturesque perfection, such that even Aidan in his dauntless natural aptitude falls second.

When the council of enchanters tells him they'd entrust him with an apprentice— _such a show of faith_ , he writes to Bull, with a healthy dose of sarcasm—he knows with worrying celerity which name he'll put forward.

 _I wonder if I'm simply seeing too much in her grief_ , he scribbles down in a nightly letter. _I wonder if that's a terrible reason to ask to tutor her. Because she is alone._

Bull replies, in a brief letter clearly written against a fence post or a rock and smelling of honey, _Maybe that should be reason enough_.

*

People pace the rhythm of their days as much as both their work does. Sera graces them with her presence at least every three months, and Cassandra rounds her trips between Val Royeaux and the Hunterhorns enough to let Bull open a good whiskey and then sleep it off in the eastern guest room. The Chargers loop through the estate every time they're excusably close; Dorian estimates this to mean "anywhere within two weeks' travel". Once upon a time, the villa had a larger staff than it does now: the old servants' wing has been repurposed into lodgings for Krem and his men.

They are his men, now. For all that Bull enjoys sticking his nose into their business, and it's a rare visit when Krem doesn't want to solicit his advice for a cantankerous client or a new tactic, the change is clear. Bull keeps up training, much as Dorian does, for habit and exercise. The pair of them could still handle a trouble of burglars or bandits.

But they've left war behind, and the world in its clemency has let them.

One even sees it in the Chargers. It isn't always violence or sickness that's plucked away a familiar face, but an altogether different sort of upheaval. Some elect to fall in love and never leave: Rocky comes over, hemming and hawing, and deposits an inquisitive toddler onto Bull's knee. Dalish and Skinner spend a winter—ostensibly Bull borrows them to guard the estate—when pregnant life on the road gets chancy.

"We should put up a sign by the road," Dorian says, while he's helping Bull to finish up the inventory of the granary. The Orlesian crown will come for its dues soon enough, and apparently they are upstanding enough citizens for taxes. " 'The Hospice of Unlikely Pilgrims'. All souls sheltered for the night."

"Come for the beds, stay for the sparkling conversation."

"You wouldn't go for _luminous_?" Dorian hums. "Such modesty."

"You're not bothered, are you?" Bull looks up from the numbers. His brows knit with the first stirrings of concern.

"Aside from the lost sleep when someone starts a chorus of _The Fairest Lads in Denerim_ in the garden past midnight?" Dorian knows he has a glimmer. Judging from the way Bull's eye softens, it's working, too. "No. Not truly. Only in the way that family aggravates you sometimes."

Bull presses his hand across the cluttered desk, and Dorian bows his head back to the inventory with his heart a little louder against his ribs.

He remembers a night from over a year ago. A question left unasked.

The estate is not large: the restored villa, the fields to the south and the orchards to the north. They keep a handful of animals, as many as the household needs, and the crops and the fruit and the milk and the honey sustain them and the small staff. They've carved it out with time and patience. Two strangers in a strange land.

And yet, when Dorian sits up with the force of the thought, he knows that's stopped being true long ago.

_Did you ever wish for a family?_

Tangled up in memory, he'd perhaps meant that in the narrow sense of his old homeland: lineages and legacies, unbroken, winding ribbons of parents and children.

Here, family is scattered across the map, and comes in odd doses and at inconvenient hours. It is the smell of roses in the morning as much as the glint of a perfected barrier in the practice chambers. It is Bull upsetting the breakfast table in his hurry to cave Krem's ribs in with a greeting hug, and Dorian laughing and cursing the spilled coffee just when he'd measured it right.

It will be, perhaps, the sound of feet in these rooms long after them, not bound by blood but by love. Dorian pushes his chair back.

"Hmm?" Bull's quill stops in the middle of tallying as Dorian winds his bare arms around his shoulders, slotting his head in under a horn.

"I'm not bothered," Dorian mutters against his cheek. Bull's fingers nudge up under his jaw, gentle and solid. "Only very fortunate."


End file.
